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How To: Make Your Own Laundry Detergent

How To: DIY Cheap Laundry Detergent

Although this is not a new thing, there are a number of people trying to remake their household cleaning supplies by using natural products or making their own to save money. I thought this would be an interesting way to stretch our dollars at home, and decided I was up for the science experiment!
With recipes all over the web, there are plenty of ways to do this. I, being me, like to spice things up a bit, and make my own version. One of my favorite home books, Homemade (by Readers' Digest) is an excellent place to start in making things from scratch with basic home essentials like the all-inclusive Baking Soda.
With my bucket from the $1 section at Super Saver, I set to work finding the following products: Baking Soda, Borax, and Washing Soda (+ a bar of soap like, Ivory, if you don't have that at home...I used my on-hand Dove soap). For a dry version, you can just use a mixture of all the powders, but if you'd like to make more, you can boil water and add it to the mix, then stir.
How to:
Grate the soap into a bucket
Pour boiling water (I used roughly 10 cups, but I "guesstimated", I generally don't follow any recipes exact) and stir in soap until melted
add 1 c. baking soda
1 c. borax
1 c. washing soda
Stir.

Ta-Daa! Now because I didn't follow the recipe exactly, I think I will try this on towels or blankets first, to see how it turns out, I'll keep you posted!

UPDATE: The detergent did not stay foam-y and water-y as the picture above looks like, it took on a gel form, and using about 1/2 c. for my load, it worked great. Didn't leave items with any residue (I was a little worried since I didn't use a "pure" form of soap, but what I had on hand) and seemed to work perfectly fine!~

*Cute BabyMast pics Here*

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Comments

RT said…
Definitely keep us posted! I've been thinking about making my own detergent to both save money and know what ingredients are in our household soaps.
Anonymous said…
Sarah -- how much did this make? How often do you have to make a new batch?

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